Amplifying Strategic Growth of a Hospitality Group: White Rabbit Projects
John Canning, Finance Director of White Rabbit Projects, remembers the pain of doing consolidated cash flow forecasting for his group with multiple spreadsheets and explains the role Agicap now plays for long-term strategic growth.
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Key takeaways
The business model of White Rabbit Projects as a Hospitality incubator relies on finding and growing early-stage hospitality concepts with new sites. Which is why the use of cash for growth is of critical importance.
The ambitious long-term strategic planning of the group to open new sites requires a careful planning and employment of cash.
White Rabbit Projects chose Agicap because of its integration capability with both the group’s existing accounting software (Xero) and the bank. Thus the finance team was able to shorten the time frame for cash flow forecasting from one day to under an hour and the time for cash flow consolidation between entities and the group into a matter of seconds.
" We use the cash to grow the business in terms of opening new sites and it’s really important to have a handle on that cash flow, because it enables you to better deploy the cash to maximize the potential for growth. "
1,000+
employees in the company
50+
global sites, including brands Lina Stores, Kricket and Island Poké
24+
hours per month saved using Agicap for cash flow management
White Rabbit Projects
Customer’s history
White Rabbits Projects started in 2016 as a specialist hospitality incubator. CEO Chris Miller, former Commercial Director for the Soho House Group, COO Éadaoin McDonagh (Harvey Nichols, Kofler Group) and Culinary Director Karl Thompson (Mustard Catering, Mustard Foods) pooled their rich experience to draw up a wide-ranging development platform for restaurants. White Rabbit Projects now not only offers investment for their brands, but also guidance on how to scale the performance across all areas of the restaurant business.
White Rabbit Projects’ current portfolio consists of more than 1,000 team members working across more than 50 global sites, including well-known culinary brands such as Lina Stores, Kricket and Island Poké. This success, however, sometimes made the financial management of the group’s cash rather painful for its finance director John Canning and his team.
In excess of six hours in totality, so pretty much an entire working day every single week was spent by Canning’s finance team on preparing spreadsheets around the cash flow inflows and outflows of the group and its entities. But because everything was being done manually, mistakes were often made. Thus important things got overlooked and this resulted in suboptimal decisions.
To take the cash flow management for Lina Stores as an example, John Canning and his team were faced with 13 separate legal entities. They had to regularly do 13 separate downloads of aged payables and then manually manipulate the data within Excel to come up with a forecast of cash outflows for the next six weeks. They needed a solution to provide better automation and more reliable data.
" Before Agicap, we managed cash through a series of very painful spreadsheets that were incredibly difficult to manipulate and took a long time to update. "
Customer’s needs
Optimize the cash visibility for better investment decisions.
Reduce the time spent on manually aggregating cash flow data of several legal entities and reconciling payment data from various sources.
Identify the amount of cash available for investing in new sites for the continued growth of the group and its projects.
At this stage of development, White Rabbit Projects needed more manpower in the finance team to oversee the cash flow side of the business. Agicap made it possible to better allocate this time.
Solution
Thanks to Agicap, John Canning and his team were able to reduce their time spent on collecting and checking cash flow data (from six hours to one), timing the payments of key suppliers more accurately and free up time for more strategic long-term planning.
" Now it’s just a couple of mouse clicks and you’ve got all the data at your fingertips. And what would have taken previously an hour to do now takes about 30 seconds. "
With the software, the finance team of White Rabbit Projects was not only able to get a clearer view of their working capital to invest in new sites, it was also a great assist in creating a schedule that maps out every new opening from now until 2028.
Conclusion
Agicap is the ideal cash flow software for growing businesses with ambition, who at the same time need to manage their cash flow carefully.
The software can help to reduce time spent on aggregating, reconciling and validating cash flow data.
It is a real game-changer for companies who are made up of several entities to monitor and consolidate.
